


A City Rising

by cyprith



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-18 07:44:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 9,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1420129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyprith/pseuds/cyprith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of scattered moments in Marilyn's rise as the New Vegas Queen. (Written in response to my open call for Five Word Fallout Prompts on Tumblr.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tails

[dharmabeatdownblog](http://dharmabeatdownblog.tumblr.com/) prompted: The safe clicked shut- darkness.

—

Tails

—

The safe—the vault, the heart of Sierra Madre—clicks shut behind her, unheard beneath the wail of sirens. The lights fail. Marilyn staggers, blind and groping for the elevator as plasma bursts against her heels.

And then, her hands catch metal. A security hologram flickers somewhere above, its red-glow lighting enough of the platform for her to spot the elevator. In the ceiling, the sound system crackles. Raw fragments of Dean Domino spill from every speaker. She cannot place his words over the sirens, over her screaming collar, but understands his voice, tight with fear. For her—he is frightened _for her_. And though he reminds her of Benny—razor-edged wreckage dressed to dance—here, now, she trusts him.

Marilyn heaves her unwieldy sack of gold into the elevator’s gaping maw. Without looking, she tumbles after, back to the wall, Gauss pointed towards the open door, screaming, “Dean, _call it_!”

And she’s laughing—she’s shaking and laughing as tears streak the red war paint the Madre gave her—because she can see the new world, the New _Vegas,_ turning like a coin in the air.

The elevator door grinds shut. The box begins to rise, rocking with a series of small-charge explosions down below. Still, Marilyn lets her gun fall. She claws at her throat—singing, sobbing—and the collar crumbles away in her hands.

When she stumbles out into the casino suite, dragging gold and a dead man’s weapon, she finds Dean waiting. He is pale behind his scars and glasses, but grinning, his own face streaked with tears.

He chokes, “Tails.”

Marilyn spills gold onto the carpet between them and sees a city rising in the play of light.

“Tails,” she agrees. And then, finding his eyes, “How would you like a stage?”


	2. Future Aflame

[benjibreak](http://benjibreak.tumblr.com) prompted: With your eyes on me

—

Future Aflame

—

Her name first finds him at Nipton, over Alerio’s broken body, puddling in the ash and dust.

Inculta regards the wreckage of the city with an appraiser’s eye, counting crosses, the fires and feral dogs. Blood soaks the city steps, trailing crimson fingers like a lover down the pockmarked road, drawing the eye upward.

But where he should find a tableau of fallen profligates, their eyes fixed in holy fear, Inculta instead encounters a dead auxiliary. They sit together, shoulder to empty shoulder, festering in heady sunlight, their heads balanced in their laps, helmets at their feet.

An insult—an ancient insult—from a long dead tribe.

One of Inculta’s scouts ventures close to the bodies, a handkerchief pressed to his nose. He pulls a shred of paper from Alerio’s grimace and opens it there, in the stink and the flies.

“ _Your eyes on me_ ,” he reads. “It’s signed _Marilyn_.”

His own eyes hidden behind his goggles, Inculta says nothing. His silence sends the scout scuttling back to his side, leaving the note to flutter to the dust.

Inculta holds out a hand. Immediately, the man retrieves it, before the wind can take it elsewhere.

_Your eyes on me_ —and the dead auxiliary all face north.

To Vegas, to the Lucky 38 like a distant knife-wound against the sky.

“Very well,” Inculta says, and goes to lay eyes on the woman who would dare invite him.


	3. Suits Him Fine

[vivacioustavernwench](http://vivacioustavernwench.tumblr.com) prompted: Secret tunnel, through the mountain

—

Suits Him Fine

—

They arrive in Bitter Springs with the night chill, travelling light, sweat-stiff collars chafing under the sway of the near-empty packs they carry. The place smells of sewage and charred molerat, infection and desperation.

Straight-faced, shoulders steady, Boone swallows it like poison due. He stands in the thick of it, every muscle taut, regret and remembered fear sour on his tongue. For some time, he wallows in memory, tracks slaughter by the light of a long-ago sun.

When he comes to—when he remembers the day, the month, the year—the moon lights a strip through the camp. Marilyn stands nearby, washed in silver, staring at the graffiti-gashed door of a make-shift shack. Even from this distance, he sees the ghosts in her eyes, but Boone knows not to ask. They keep their demons distant.

Suits him fine.

—

They make camp on Coyote Tail ridge. No fire. Just two bodies, shoulder to shoulder, bellies in the dust, their eyes on Canyon 37.

When the Legion breaches the gap, they carry torches and shout commands. Boone picks them off like shooting bottles—easy as women and children, injured and sick. He aims for red—red—red, smelling blood and smoke and cordite, feeling the recoil of Marilyn’s gun through the dirt beside him, her every exhale timed with his. He shoots until his gun runs dry, reloads and shoots again.

They go hunting, prowling through the darkness.

When the sun rises, the first fingers of light over the lip of the ridge find them blood-spattered—Marilyn to her elbows, hacking the heads from Legionaries and tucking each face between its owner’s knees.

Standing at a little distance, Boone watches her work. She severs their spines easy, machete falling like gunshots, like practice, and even from here, Boone can hear her ghosts howling. He recognizes the darkness in her eyes as the one that wakes him screaming.

So he says nothing. Stands back, keeps guard, keeps vigil. Offers her a cigarette when she finishes.

Marilyn shakes her head, walks down to the river to wash her hands.

Suits him fine.

—

They don’t leave. Place is in bad shape—and though Marilyn has told him before she hates the Two-Headed Bear, she can’t stand to see its people suffer. So she climbs into the mountains and he follows, worming along behind her through the secret tunnels there.

Marilyn walks with one hand trailing the wall, the other in his, leading him through the pitch-black with her head high and gait steady. She doesn’t think of her Pip-boy light until he asks.

But when she turns the dial and the chamber floods with watery green light, Boone finds himself standing beside a chain-link gate, supplies stacked in the room beyond.

She didn’t need it, he realizes. She knew the way.

“You been here before?” he asks.

Pulling bobby-pins from her pack, Marilyn shrugs. She taps the shatter-shards of her scars, eyes bright and flat like coins in the half-dark.

Watching her hands, the glimmer of her eyes, Boone thinks of Manny for the first time since Novac. He remembers cold nights and low fires, Manny telling stories from his childhood—talking about Coyote, some jack-ass sorta-god shape-shifter. Stole fire for humans and never did a good thing after.

“Doesn’t matter what he looks like; you’ll know him by his eyes,” Manny would say, balancing a beer between his knees to wiggle fingers in the firelight. “Spooky shit, man.”

“Bullshit,” he’d say, easy as practice. But Boone watches Marilyn prowl into the storeroom like she grew up here, eyes flat and shining, and fuck him, but he almost believes it. He finds himself eyeing the patchwork webbing that creeps from her hair, wondering if he met her once before, if maybe a stray .308 paved the way for Benny’s .22.

“You remember much?” he tries.

“Stop it,” Marilyn snaps without heat, sad and cold as the ghosts in her eyes as she fills her bag with stored-up food. “It’s done and gone. You can’t put me back together again.”

Boone shrugs. He lets the subject drop. They’re good at that; they don’t talk much.

Don’t need to when they’re so damn much alike.

Suits him fine.


	4. Battlefields Like Dancing

[alonelyscapula](http://alonelyscapula.tumblr.com) prompted: I have loose morals.

—

Battlefields Like Dancing

—

Here in Vegas, she wears a dead woman’s dress beneath a murderer’s checkered coat. She wears ochre gowns of cazador wings, deathclaw leather bright as bones. Marilyn decorates her neck with teeth the way Vera wore her pearls, and people call her beautiful.

Domino has never been more wary of a woman.

Still, she prepared him well on the long trek home again, and for all her venom and bloodstains, Domino finds New Vegas not so different from the old. He remembers how to dance—he cuts in just fine.

It occurs to him, though, watching his audience, that the world burned and no one noticed.

He is a wreckage. He is monstrous. He is Death, singing a siren’s song. He smiles at himself in mirrors, expecting the glass to break, sharp as his own shards. He wakes in the night with his hands clenched at his throat, tearing at a beeping bowtie that isn’t there.

Still. His glass never empties. He never walks alone for long. Tommy Torini takes his word for law.

He finds it a comfort, those strings of weeks he cannot sleep.

—

After a particularly nasty week, when even the sound of his own voice through speakers sets his heart sprinting in his chest, Marilyn finds him. One moment he is alone in his rooms, knuckles white around the radio case—the next, he is not.

She sits at the farthest stool of the bar, hair half shorn to show her scars, wearing bits of mismatched armor—the skins of dead monsters, as ever. Caesar, he thinks, by her crimson. But then, he could be wrong. In her hands, she holds the empty head of a dog.

“What brings you to my neck of the woods, partner?” he asks, when his heart slows and he can walk away from the radio to join her without hearing the _beep, beep, beep_ in his head. Careful as courting cazadores, he eases in beside her.

She glances at him, her web-work scars stark in the sparse lighting and when their eyes meet, for an instant, Domino sees a battlefield.

She doesn’t say a word. Neither does he—simply takes a bottle and pours the drinks. For some time, they do not speak, Marilyn tracing hearts in the bloodstains on his bar.

 “Who was he?” he asks at last. When she looks up, he points to the bar with the lip of his glass.

The look in her eyes—he is certain she will not answer him. For a moment, for the fires in her eyes, he thinks she will leave. And then she says, “Benny.”

He has heard the name before, in whispers, when she wears the checkered coat—knows the name belongs to the scars on her scalp and so, knows enough to say nothing.

Knows enough, perhaps, but risks regardless.

“Warning or trophy?” he asks, gentle as a hand of aces.

The question surprises her. She lifts her head to look, catches his eyes and smiles—a brief glimmer, there and gone, but her fingers close around her glass for the first time. She lets the empty head of a dog slump to the floor.

“Both, maybe. Does it bother you?”

“That you killed him?” Dean thinks of Vera, shy and smiling on Sinclair’s arm, the man so smug and swollen with his own regard. He shrugs, hand tight around his glass. “I’m in show business, darling. I have loose morals.”

Marilyn laughs. He thinks she could be beautiful, but for the knives and gunshots in her smile.

Still, he likes her. Though he wakes in the night to the image of her face, dead-eyed and determined across a theater filled with ghosts—though he still hears her laughing in the elevator as it rises, the collar falling from his throat—he likes her.

And he’s never made friends. He’s in show business, after all. But perhaps this is all friendship is. Two monsters at a bloodstained bar, as wary of themselves as they are of each other.

Domino knocks back the rest of his drink, turns his tumbler over on the bar.

“Let’s go dancing,” he says.

And Marilyn smiles.


	5. Martyrs, Saints, Sinners

[reetm](http://reetm.tumblr.com) prompted: bloody crocodile tears

—

**Martyrs, Saints, Sinners**

—

Marilyn sees him twice before she kills him.

She regrets both occasions.

And she doesn’t.

—

Oddly enough, the first hurts most.

She exits the Tops with a checkered jacket, bits of Benny caked beneath her fingernails, and stepping into the world again, walking into sunlight, she sees a ghost.

Her twin stands at the edge of what will one day be Vegas Square, one foot in history, the other somewhere farther ahead. His hat throws shadows into his eyes, remembering war paint, remembering the choking smoke of flesh-fires and loss and salted earth. He lifts his eyes to her, and his smile is fallow ground.

“I bring tidings from Caesar,” he murmurs, soft as soot, stepping closer. He reaches towards her, hand flat. A coin catches the sun in his palm.

Words fail her.

Tomorrow, Marilyn will seize the tower. She will burrow into House’s den, and when she emerges red in tooth and claw, it will be as the voice of Vegas.

Tomorrow, she will speak, and an army will know what it is to fear.

Tomorrow, she will raise a new flag over Vegas, and a city will know what it is to _hope_.

Today, she faces the shadow of her brother, and can only remember the words of their childhood, catching in her throat like shards of mirror. Despite the pain, Marilyn swallows. She clenches her bloodied fists. Slowly, she slips her arms into Benny’s jacket—the skin of her enemy—and she sees her brother understands.

“Marilyn,” he says, and in his mouth, her name is a fresh sin.

He _wants_ this, she sees. Her brother, her blood—tortured and twisted, a bastard monstrosity of the boy she loved—and he wants the same for her. Knowing what they would do to her, knowing the beast she would become, he turns his face to that future and calls it _honor._

She strikes him. Fast as snakes, she knocks his hand aside, sends his token tumbling like shattered sunlight to the dust.

She names him. Speaks the name of their mother—unheard since fear and fires—and drives him away with the weight of his history. She says, “You are my brother,” and loves him still, though she knows, the next time they meet, she will kill him or she will die.

“You are _nothing_ ,” he snarls, eyes sharp and so empty. “The last of a forgotten tribe. What good does your resistance bring you?”

“Peace,” she tells him and Marilyn stands in the sunlight, stained with blood, and watches her brother flee.

—

The second happens like a bruise in the night—a pain without definition, unconstrained by time.

Marilyn crouches over Lenius’ fallen form, his mask some distance away, her machete in her hand. She happens to look up—happens to survey her work—and sees a shape darting along the wall.

She knows her brother’s shoulders, knows his gait, even as she whispers, “ _Boone.”_

Easy like bottles, Boone sights and fires.

Once, twice.

Her machete falls.

Marilyn kicks the head over the hillside, over the tents, and climbs down after it.

She sinks cross-legged in the dirt beside her brother, takes the dog from his head and eases shut what remains of his eyes, weeping bloody crocodile tears. Boone follows. He looks between her face and the face in the dust, and carefully—so carefully—turns away.

Tomorrow, Marilyn will start reconstruction.

Tomorrow, she will worry about taxes and housing and food availability.

Tomorrow, she will open her doors to the refugees of this war and tell them, “ _Bear no flag but mine, and live your lives._ ”

Today, she names the body of her brother. She places bottle caps on his eyes.  She swallows the razor shards of her tribe’s broken history, sings a song for death—

And when she stands, holding the empty head of a dog, Marilyn stares an army down.


	6. A Legacy

[chocochipbiscuit](http://chocochipbiscuit.tumblr.com) prompted: Diamond tears hitting the floor

—

**A Legacy**

—

At first, when Marilyn tells him about the terminal in the belly of the vault, Domino laughs.

“There was a warning in the message for Vera not to access his personal accounts,” she says, boots crossed at the ankle, watching him dress. “Hacked it sideways. A little. Saw the code. Looked like a trigger mechanism.”

“Probably to seal the vault,” he tells her, slipping on his jacket and offering his arm. “Sounds about his style. If you can call it style _._ ”

Later though, he dreams.

—

In his dreams, the vault drips with rotting riches. Moth eaten silks drape the walls. Velvet couches molder in the corners, studded with pearls and tarnished silver. Golden statues raise their arms to the ceiling, weeping ill-cut diamonds and losing each to the wreckage of the floor.

Holograms of Sinclaire fill the shadows, laughing, sneering, “ _Fortunato_ ,”—the man read a book once in his lifetime, thought himself so fucking clever.

Still, Dean sweats through his sheets, wakes furious and groping for the radio. He finds his voice on the airwaves and though the sound of it fills his head with beeping, at least Elijah was a competent monster. No shame in fearing _him_.

But as the nights pass, aching onward, eventually Dean gives up sleeping. He wanders Vegas instead, watching Marilyn’s buildings shake off the dust of their history, reclaim their facades. On a whim, he tries the doors of the Lucky 38—two-hundred years ago, he’d meant to perform at its grand opening—and wouldn’t you know it, the metal bouncers let him right it.

“Facial recognition accepted,” one says, and Domino walks into the elevator, wondering when Marilyn ever got a decent picture of his face.

Before he can press a button, the box begins to rise. For an instant, at the pressure in his ancient, battered knees, fear fills his mouth like water, drowns his lungs in rage. A voice in his head howls— _a trap, a trap, how dare she?—_ but Domino swallows. Hands clenched, he hums an old tune, forces his demons down.

She needs him. He is no good to her dead. _She needs him_.

When the elevator begins to slow, nearing its destination, Domino hears Marilyn beyond the doors, snarling, “And do _what_ , exactly, Raul? Change your name again? _Run?_ ”

But the box announces his arrival—“Dean Domino here to see you, boss,” in a voice like too-sweet gin—and by the time the doors slide open, Marilyn is silent, face hard.  Her ancient ranch hand stands nearby, nearly grinding teeth.

Domino smiles, strides out like dancing, and judging by the dark flicker in the man’s eyes, his appearance doesn’t help whatever argument they’d been having. Not at all. But oh, to make another man jealous—what a fine and bitter vintage. Domino smiles, savoring the taste.

“Am I interrupting?” he asks.

Shoulders hard, the ranch hand spins on his heel and disappears into another room, slamming the door behind him.

Marilyn’s face does not change. She betrays nothing—not aces or twos—and Domino remembers her face as each ghost fell. Hunting.

“I’ve been working on something for you,” she says, poinsettia scars so sharp against her scalp. “You might not like it.”

It’s an odd invitation, but honest—peaks his interest as flattery could not—and she knows him. Three weeks in the memory of opulence, and Marilyn knows him.

He should be worried, Domino thinks. He should, at least, be wary. He is an old monster, but he is out of practice, and Marilyn’s teeth are sharper than his ever were. She is precise, cold as a scalpel. A smarter man would run.

Ah, but show business does leave its scars.

Domino smiles and takes her arm.

—

This time, the elevator brings him to the basement. The room is vast, filled with pipes and crates and twisting halls. Marilyn leads him through the thick of it, through a work room with thirty securitrons in various states of disassembly—past a metal body on a slab in the shape of a man—and into a smaller room beyond.

Here, the tables lay filled with signage. Bits of neon tubing litter the floor, shattered light bulbs spangling the walls like the curtains of an old Vegas stage. Marilyn crosses the room, mindless of her bare feet, and pulls a sheet down from a sign taller than herself.

Domino cannot breathe.

He stares into his own grinning maw, two hundred years younger, and watches the lights behind it catch and fade, revealing the wreckage of the man he is today. He looks like he’s dancing, youth and disease. At his side, he holds his name like a cane—DEAN written in tight diamonds, DOMINO neon and descending.

He thinks of gold statues weeping, thinks of Sinclaire rotten in the wreckage of his one achievement, and standing before his own face, flickering between life and death and two hundred years, Domino laughs.

“It’s perfect,” he tells her, all teeth. “I have a legacy.”


	7. Future Perfect

[benjibreak](http://benjibreak.tumblr.com) prompted: Cold, sleepless

\--

**Future Perfect**

—

She doesn’t tell them. Months, it must have taken, but she doesn’t say a word. 

Arcade likes to think she could have come to _him_ at least, likes to believe that his opinion is worth _something_ in her estimation, but obviously not. She had to know what he’d say to this.

Yes Man was bad enough. Absolute power corrupting absolutely, and all that. The _last_ thing Vegas needed was an ultra-powerful AI capable of accessing any system and equally _in_ capable of declining any order. And he’d _spoken_ to her about that—she’d even _agreed_.

Well, alright, to a point. She’d agreed to see about fixing the security loopholes in Yes Man’s software. But Arcade had been sure she _understood._

Only, now, he stands in the entryway with the others, facing a grinning metal monstrosity of a human construct.

“Hi there,” it says—smiling, always smiling—and Arcade feels ice rolling in his gut.

Boone actually takes off his sunglasses. “That Yes Man?” he asks, looking between it and Marilyn.

Marilyn nods. She’s wearing Benny’s suit again—never a good sign at the best of times—her sleeves stained with oil.

Hopefully oil.

“I needed a partner the city could see,” she says, like it’s nothing, another foundling and fresh sheets. “He’s still settling on a name.”

Still, the machine keeps smiling. And Arcade can see it has the means to do otherwise; the metal plates that make up its face are as fine and varied as the inner workings of a clock. But following the seams of metal in its jaw and eyes, Arcade comes away with the distinct and unsettling certainty he does _not_ want to see it frown.

“I’m thinking Frederick Walker,” it says. “Freddy’s got a nice ring.”

Arcade swallows, glancing around at the others. Cass doesn’t care. Veronica just wants to take it apart. Boone trusts anything Marilyn does. Only Raul looks concerned, but he’s been planning on leaving for days, packing and unpacking the same bag when he thinks they’re asleep. Arcade knows he’ll get no help from him.

Considering his words carefully, he says, “Marilyn, can I talk to you?”

Thankfully, she agrees.

—

When the door to the master bedroom closes, Marilyn shucks off her coat, steps out of her boots. Arcade watches the skin of her enemy fall to the floor, and as far as signals go, he doesn’t know if this is better or worse.

“He’s _terrifying_ , Marilyn,” he says. “Do you _want_ to inspire fear in your city?”

Looking at him, she considers it. God help them—she actually has to _consider it_ —and that scares the hell out of him.

At least she’s not just handing out platitudes to soothe him, he thinks, and tries to tell himself it’s better. She’s questioning her choices this way—examining the issue. That’s always healthy in a leadership position.

But then she answers, “Yes,” and Arcade’s heart plummets, rolls rotting in his stomach.

Vegas loves Marilyn. The people here would happily follow her to their destruction. Her collection of lost souls—remnants of the Bull and Bear, soldiers adrift without gods or cause—would burn the world at word in her name.

Gently, Marilyn smiles. She sits down at the edge of the bed, and without her boots and jacket, her scars so sharp in the poor lighting, she looks small.

“I’m almost pretty,” she tells him. “When the light’s right. When the caravans come in. When my buildings open and everything’s fresh paint and new flooring and hope. People forget the blood on my hands.”

“So you built that horror show to remind them? Marilyn, _why_?”

“House rotted in the belly of his beast, demanding taxes. Caesar never wandered far from his tent. Kimball came out when the weather looked nice and ran when he saw the sun in a sniper’s scope,” she says, tracing the lines on her palms with a blunt fingernail. “I am not afraid. I will not be challenged.”

Dread seeps into the pit of Arcade’s stomach. And he knows—he _knows_ Marilyn means well. Just last week construction finished on two apartment complexes in Freeside—three _hundred_ _families_ off the street, out of the flop houses and out of the sewers. She had the farming irrigation fixed and filtered for radiation. She took Boone, and between the two of them reestablished the trading corridor through I-15. Looking at her—looking at her vision—Arcade _wants_ to trust her.

But a monster stands beyond that door, cold and unsleeping, thinking of giving itself a name.

“That’s not how effective government _works_ ,” he tries, but Marilyn purses her lips.

“Isn’t it?” she asks. “They died and I didn’t. I climbed out of _my_ grave.”

For a moment, Arcade closes his eyes. He understands Benny’s coat then, discarded on the floor. Still, he sighs. Carefully, he crosses the room to sit beside her.

“So what, you’re using Yes Man as some kind of bogie man?”

Marilyn shrugs. “I trust him.”

“He’s a machine. He has vulnerabilities,” Arcade insists. “Vulnerabilities, I might mention, that _you_ exploited in order to gain your current position of power.”

Marilyn shakes her head. “Not anymore. The problem in his programming was a firmware incompatibility. Benny tried to put an android consciousness into a securitron mainframe.”

And Arcade wants to know, where did Benny even _find_ an android component this far from the Commonwealth? He means to ask—turns to do so—but the implication shudders in his head, strikes him like a blow.

Arcade stops, stares at Marilyn.

“But androids have…” he begins and cannot finish.

She nods. “Free will.”

“Good lord,” Arcade whispers, seeing a future greater in scope than anything her predecessors could have imagined. “And he can access _everything_. Any machine in Vegas.”

Marilyn smiles. “We are Vegas.”


	8. All Hail

[reetm](http://reetm.tumblr.com) prompted: All hail the Queen!

—

**All Hail**

—

Domino doesn’t intend on going. It’s not as though his world revolves around her. Certainly, he has other plans.

But she sends him an invitation, gold gilt on cream— _his_ gold on House stationary—and he’s known Marilyn just long enough to hear her when she doesn’t speak. She has something exciting boiling on the horizon and she wants him in a front row seat.

Well, who is he to turn down a date with a queen?

—

He arrives to New Vegas Square late, of course. Just late enough to flirt the boundary of bad manners, drawing every eye as the securitrons clear a path to his seat. And oh, how quaint—Marilyn has him rubbing elbows with the _King_.

Two hundred years ago, Domino wouldn’t have spared a glance at such a cheap imitation. Men without style of their own—thieves and petty mockeries like Sinclaire—weren’t worth the time it took to pass them on the street. Yet, today, Domino gives the “King” a respectful nod as he takes his seat.

Funny how things change, he thinks.

In a moment, Marilyn takes the stage before him. She smiles, pretty as a picture in her half-head of curls. But the lights catch in her eyes—flat, sharp coins—and under her stare, the crowd falls silent.

She speaks, of course, though later Domino will not remember what she said. Things that did not interest him—tax rates, new buildings, new services. Some sort of defunct trade company returning to service—Casino Caravans, Cassandra Caravans, something mindless of that nature—while at his other elbow, a woman in her no doubt very _best_ pair of threadbare jeans smiles wider than Marilyn’s new Mr. Walker, all the while looking close to tears.

Tedious, all of it.

Domino never had the patience for politics. At least, not far beyond his stage. When Marilyn speaks, he hears only the promise of tourists, and after the several galas now he’s helped her to prepare, _increased tourism_ is hardly news to him.

No, later Domino will not remember anything she said. Instead, he will remember her eyes—the eyes of an animal—and the sound of a rifle shot echoing through the square.

For an instant, the breath of a second, a double halo flares around Marilyn’s head. It burns like blue flame, an electric instant, there and gone as she falls and crashes to the stage.

Heart in his throat, Domino surges to his feet. Some several people scream. The bodyguard at Marilyn’s side draws a rifle. He fires three shots at the roof of an unremodeled wreckage as twin securitrons scale the side of the building, leaving fist-sized indents in the brick.

A gun falls to the pavement. The machines crest the roof.

A body falls to the pavement. The machines begin their descent.

And Marilyn stands.

Abruptly, silence sinks its teeth into the crowd. Domino stands with the rest of them, struck stupid and mute, watching her shake the dirt from her hair.

“On that note,” she says, gingerly feeling out the edges of the nasty bruise flaring above her eye. “Mr. Craig Boone will be heading New Vegas Enforcement out of the old embassy building. As you can see, clearly the best man for the job.”

And Domino understands her invitation, then—yet another of her New Vegas shows.

But, perhaps… Already, the image of Marilyn’s eyes in the streetlight haunts him. And she’s told him before, hasn’t she? Described in detail the sharp corners of a previous grave.

She’s climbed out of others, he thinks. She’s climbed out of _hundreds_.

_Coyote_ , they call her, those remnants of the Bull that haunt the shadows of his club.

Perhaps they’re right.

Hardly matters either way. A show’s a show at the end of the day.

Slowly, Domino begins to clap—

And suddenly, the square is awash in thunderous, deafening applause.

“The queen is dead,” someone screams. “Long live the queen,” a cry taken up like arms until the words fill the sky.

Through the noise of raucous joy, Domino catches Marilyn’s eyes. He presses his ruined fingers to his lips, blows her a kiss.

And over the distance between them, he whispers, “ _All hail_.”


	9. History in Lights

Anon prompted: I’m so tired of this

 

—

**History in Lights**

—

Boone doesn’t speak a whole lot of Spanish. Never had much need to, what with Manny always somewhere nearby and happy to translate. Most he knows is a handful of old cusswords, but from what he can tell, Raul’s worked his way through those already, charged head on into something else.

Marilyn, though. She don’t seem to speak it, but she understands the old ghoul just fine. From what Boone can hear between slamming doors and overturned crates, she follows right along behind him, howling at his storm.

“What’s all this about if not your _history_!” she demands, wrenching open a door Raul slammed. “You wanted her remembered—I put her name in _lights_!”

In the flurry that follows, Boone recognizes only _Rafaela_.

Something about Marilyn’s newest building, then. Or maybe it’s namesake. Boone doesn’t know a woman by that name, but maybe Raul does, and doesn’t figure she warrants naming places after.

Not much for it, Boone figures. They’ve got Santiago Square down behind Old Mormon Fort. There’s an Israel building over in Westside. Reconstructed started on The Rose last Tuesday and Marilyn’s been talking about naming something after Carla for months.

“You’re running then?” Marilyn barks from the next room. “ _Months,_ Raul. _Months_ you bitched about feeling useless. Now, I have a place for you—I _need you_ —and you _run_.”

Boone tries to concentrate on his gun, stripping and cleaning and putting all the little parts in order on a scrap of towel. Usually, it’s soothing. Can even take his mind off Carla when things start to get real bad. But today they’re just too damn loud. Raul rattles down the hallway like a trapped thunderstorm, raging fit to burst. Something slams in the next room. Something shatters. Boone hears the elevator ping, Marilyn hissing something fierce and mean.

And then nothing.

He looks up from his gun, waiting.

Still nothing.

Sighing, Boone puts his scope down with the rest of the parts and goes to lean in the doorway. He finds Marilyn standing in the hallway, staring at the elevator door like a robot with a battery run all the way down.

“You okay?” he asks, the only thing between them that ever really needs saying.

It takes awhile, but eventually Marilyn nods. When she turns to face him, the bruise above her eye catches the light, yellowing and sore. “I am just so tired of this,” she says.

She means fighting, he figures. Hasn’t been a time Boone’s known her that Marilyn hasn’t been fighting somebody. NCR, Legion, Raiders. There’s always somebody new getting in line. Now Raul, too. And over a building, of all things.  

“Wanna beer?” he asks. Carla would’a known what to say—would’a said it better, too—but Marilyn shrugs, nods.

“Sure,” she says and smiles a little—a sad small thing. “Long as you’re not chatty.”


	10. Peace

[bullwhipsandnecrosis](http://bullwhipsandnecrosis.tumblr.com): I really need to pee

Keep prompting, guys! Five words or less. [Just hit up my ask.](http://cyprith.tumblr.com/ask)

—

**Peace**

—

It’s just starting to get cooler at night and finally, _finally,_ Carla can almost see the reason Craig has it so damn bad for Novac.

It’s… cute, in a way. Private. Vegas had its privacy in anonymity. With so many people and so much to see, unless you went out with sequins on your god givens, no one spared you a second glance.

Here, though, Novac buys its privacy in solitude. At first, the quiet drove her crazy. Nothing to do, day after day. No stories flying through the streets. No joy or scandal or sorrow. She thought she’d lose her mind. But there’s something to be said for peace.

Barefooting it through the moonlight, Carla slips inside Dinky and thunders about as elegantly as a mad Brahmin up two flights of stairs. When she opens the door, she finds her boy leaning against a tooth and smiling.

“Hey,” he says, voice soft and warm as the worn fabric of his shirt. “You get lonely?”

Carla smiles, tucks herself up under his arm. “It’s a kind of quiet meant for two.”

She feels him laugh more than she hears it, a quiet huff lost to the night breezes. Hooking her fingers in his belt loops, Carla leans her weight against him. Her boy can hold her up, she figures. Her boy can hold up the world.

“Look at that moon,” she murmurs. “Fat as I am.”

When he leans down to press his lips to her hair, she feels Craig smile. “That ain’t fat,” he says. “Fat don’t kick a man when he’s sleeping.”

“When your daddy’s First Recon, it’s the only time you kick him,” Carla says and smiles when Craig laughs.

They sit together for awhile, both of them quiet, propped up against a tooth and each other, looking out over the desert. Up here, everything looks like an old world painting. Or fabric.

And what a dress she could make with that, Carla thinks, half dozing, her head against Craig’s shoulder. Brown as earth and blue as the sky, broc flowers for buttons and barrel cactus for shoes.

Too soon, far too soon, the baby starts getting irritable and Carla has to stir herself to move.

Craig asks, “You leaving?”

“Have to pee,” she says, heaving herself upright.

Blue eyes dancing, her boy grins. “Again?”

She purses her lips. “Every fifteen minutes, feels like. This girl can go ahead and come any time she wants.”

“That the real reason you keep climbing those stairs?”

One hand on the door, Carla laughs. She turns, grinning mischief. Craig always did know her too well for his own good.

“There’s gonna be no mystery left for us when we’re fifty,” she says over her shoulder and starts down the stairs.

Behind her, she hears her boy laugh. “Suits me fine.”


	11. Absence

[alysetoahouse](http://alysetoahouse.tumblr.com): The old saying goes

 

—

**Absence**

—

Without Raul around, Boone isn’t really sure what to do with himself when he can’t sleep.

Bad nights before, the old man was always up and puttering around with something. Sometimes they talked. Most times they didn’t. There’s a kind of comfort in cleaning your guns next to somebody else, your demons elbow to elbow and sharing space at the bar. Raul understood that.

Now, somewhere past two AM, Boone wanders the kitchen alone. He digs through an old toolbox of spare parts, pokes through the fridge. Nothing much there to interest him in either case.

He pulls a beer, then turns around and puts it back again. Better not to drink, nights like this.

Still. For all his wandering, Boone ends up just the same place he always does. Rifle in hand, he sits down at the kitchen table and spreads out an old scrap of towel. Ends up thinking about Carla. Knew he would. He’s always thinking about Carla, one way or another.

It’s different, though, tonight. Hell, maybe it’s been different since Marilyn carried the empty head of a dog back from the dam. He sure felt lighter, after. Might have laughed if he didn’t know what that shot cost her.

Anyway, tonight he’s not back up on the ridge, watching a sea of hungry faces down in Cottonwood Cove. He’s not pulling his baby’s body out of the Colorado to give her a proper burial. He’s not paying penance for whatever happened in Canyon 37. Tonight, he’s not anywhere. He’s sitting in the Lucky 38, his scope in his hands, and he’s thinking.

He’s thinking Carla and Marilyn would’ve been good for each other.

It’s a shame they never met. Boone thinks they would have gotten on. Carla knew how to listen, knew how to put worries in order and shape them into sense. She had a way of coming at a problem that made it look easy. Marilyn needs somebody like that—needs someone who can empty out her head, clean it like gun parts and fit it back together.

And Carla used to love pretty things—loved _Vegas_. All Marilyn’s parties and plans, her skinned monster dresses. Carla would’ve gotten a kick out of it.

Boone wonders if there’s a word for what he’s feeling. Can you even miss a future that never had a chance in hell of happening? Raul would’ve known.

Maybe he’ll ask Gannon, he thinks, snapping his gun together. There’s probably some bullshit old saying for it in Latin.

Sometimes they even help.


	12. Where One Finds Family

[vivacioustavernwench](http://vivacioustavernwench.tumblr.com): Ode to my family

I don’t know why I ship it, but I _do._

—

**Where One Finds Family**

—

When people start shouting outside his tent, Arcade ignores it. Commotion at Old Mormon Fort is nothing new. He just hopes this particular commotion doesn’t involve a grinning metal abomination capable of accessing any electronic system in Vegas.

Not that Yes Man—wait, sorry—not that _Fredrick Walker_ bothers him, exactly. It’s just that Arcade sort of has a personal history with artificially intelligent overlords in positions of vast and unmitigated power.

You know, little stuff.  

Anyway. He has plenty to do with his barrel cactus and various mud extracts. Nothing of much interest to Marilyn or her robotic friend—and indeed, now that he listens, the half-panicked individual outside sounds nothing like Mr. Walker. Although… is that _barking_?

Oh. Oh no.

Arcade rises from his mountain of fruitless research and makes his way outside. He finds Julie flanked by two bodyguards, standing in the commons with her arms crossed. She faces a man surrounded by several dogs, teeth bared as he insists, “I _need_ a healer.”

“Sir, we help injured and sick _people_ ,” Julie tells him. “We simply do not have the resources to tend to dogs, however well loved.”

“But she is _my_ people,” he says, his dogs circling, hackles raised. “And she is one of Coyote’s!”

Nonsense to everyone else, of course, but having met the man a month ago over Marilyn’s doorstep, Arcade understands.

Sighing, he grabs his pack. He remembers the last time Julie turned a man with a sick dog away. His jaw _still_ aches to think about it.

“Antony, right?” he asks, walking out to meet him. “It’s okay, Julie. I’ll go.”

—

Not for the first time—and with alarming frequency in the last year—Arcade wonders what he’s gotten himself into.

For instance, a year ago, he’d never have considered following a Legion solider and his seething pack of hounds outside the city limits. Certainly, he’d never have gone _willingly._ Yet, today, Arcade follows the man to what used to be a fiend encampment, and for what?

Knuckles white around the strap of his bag, Arcade looks around at the vast pack of dogs trained to disembowel him at a word and considers this new strain of insanity. Must be the white knight in him, he decides as they approach a haphazard building assembled from scrap metal and an old bus. Antony isn’t exactly the… brightest star in the sky. But he’s earnest. And Marilyn trusts him, for whatever _that’s_ worth.  

So he follows Antony into the thick of his pack and through the door of the bus-hovel. The dogs, thankfully, remain outside and Arcade relaxes enough to look around.

Apparently the man isn’t quite as simple as he’d thought. Inside his home, shelves line the walls, filled with ingredients carefully labeled in a language Arcade doesn’t understand. Some sort of home-made alembic sits in the far corner, atop a humming refrigerator. In the opposite corner, a huge dog lays panting on a pair of mattresses, a beat up fan oscillating in her direction, the cord trailing to a generator outside.

Twisting his hands, Antony presses his back to the wall. Here, he looks smaller. Loose-limbed and wild, his clothes mostly leather and patches, it’s hard to see the Legion in him. He looks young—younger than himself, Arcade realizes with a jolt—and scared for his dog.

“What’s her name?” he asks gently.

“Lupa,” he says. “She took a cazador yesterday. I can’t get the poison out.”

Moving smooth and easy, Arcade rests his pack on the floor. “Will she bite me if I get close?”

For the first time, the man smiles—a quick flash of teeth, eyes darting away. Almost charming.

“Only if I ask,” he says.

Well, so much for comfort.

Creeping forward on his knees, Arcade gets to work.

—

Though the dog wears the brand of a bull in her ear, true to Antony’s word, she doesn’t offer Arcade more than a sad thump of her tail when he creeps to her side. He finds the wound shallow and clean, though blue and bloodless around the edges.

It’s not a complicated fix. He gives the dog a small steroid shot, mixes two parts anti-venom to one part stimpak and hooks her to it on an IV drip. Humming a tune Arcade doesn’t recognize, Antony holds her massive head, distracting her from the needle with his hands on her ears.

Nothing to do now but wait for the wound to close.

Arcade sits back on his heels. Sweat rolling between his shoulder blades, he strips out of his coat and folds it into his pack. When he looks up, quietly, Antony offers, “Beers in the fridge.”

A year ago—no, never mind. Best not to dwell on what the Arcade of a year ago might have said or thought or done. The Arcade of a year ago lived in a very different world.

He looks at the man sitting with his injured dog, stealing glances at Arcade like sips of water, lonely and hopeful and lost. He has no one, Arcade knows. Whatever tribe he used to hail burned when Caesar came to power, and again when he lost it. His only family now sleeps on the dirt outside, a vicious pack of dogs.

And Arcade understands. He knows the shape of that burden.

History sits like ghosts on his shoulders, too.

He nods. Smiles. “I’d like that.”

And Arcade is sweaty and flushed and decidedly unattractive, but Antony’s eyes light just the same.


	13. Vaquero

Anon prompted: Old world lover

—

**Vaquero**

—

For the first couple of days, he keeps expecting her to follow him. Keeps expecting he’ll open the door one morning to find her there, yelling or smiling. Either one will lead to a fight, another argument and fists clenched so tight the skin of his knuckles will split even without him hitting anything. He stalks around the place like a mean old cat, knocking things off shelves for the hell of it, picking fights with his own ghosts. Waiting.

But Marilyn doesn’t follow him.

—

The first couple of days turns into the first couple of weeks and Raul’s fires bank. He might have overreacted. Maybe. Maybe not. He doesn’t like his history hanging out there like dirty laundry in the wind, doesn’t like his sister’s name—his bloodied past—on every stranger’s lips. But in the quiet spaces of the morning, he can hear Rafaela laughing at him.

She always wanted to be famous. A singer, a movie star. Two hundred years late, but Marilyn gave her a stage. She would have liked that. Maybe that’s what matters.

It gets so that Raul can turn on the radio again. He can hear Marilyn’s voice now, those recorded moments between songs, without hurting so bad he can feel it in his teeth.

Still, she should have asked. Should have talked to him about it. You can’t just take part of a person’s history like that.

But then, Raul hunches over his workbench of broken parts, thinking about Santiago Square, the Israel Building, the Rose. He thinks about Marilyn sitting up with Boone in the late hours of the night, asking, “Would she have preferred a store or a street?”

He thinks, maybe if you’re Marilyn, you can.

He waits.

But Marilyn doesn’t follow him.

—

The first couple of weeks turns into a month, then more, and Raul gives up waiting. She’s not coming. He slides back into an old routine he always hated, fixing things he wouldn’t want even if they worked. At least now the songs on the radio are different, new for the first time in two hundred years.

Still, when the nights get old, he opens up the footlocker beside his bed. Inside sits a sun-faded _vaquero_ costume and a stack of well-folded maps. Raul takes the maps. He spreads them out on his ugly, empty mattress, tracing his scarred fingers down the lines of roads he used to know the shape of.

He wonders what California looks like now. He hasn’t seen the ocean in a hundred and seventy years.

Carefully, he folds them up again and puts them away. Tomorrow, he thinks.

He’s thought the same thing for the last twenty-three days.

Somewhere far away, Rafaela’s still laughing at him.

Raul closes his eyes and tries to sleep.

—

He must do a better job of it than he thought. When he wakes up, fingers of sunlight sneaking through the cracks in his roof, he finds Marilyn sitting cross legged on the foot of the mattress, his maps spread like carpet on the floor. He should have heard her coming. But then, he never does.

Raul thinks he should still be angry, but he’s a tired old man and he doesn’t have the fuel for that kind of fire anymore. He’s just happy to see her—he’s not too proud to admit it; Rafaela can laugh all she likes—he’s just happy he meant enough for her to come.

He rolls over, props his head in his hands and watches. Marilyn hears him. She turns, smiles.

And she’s beautiful.

The sunlight catches hooks in every spider-webbed scar of her once-shattered skull. Crow’s feet pull at the corners of her too-dark eyes, blue as broken bottles in shallow water. But she smiles at him, all heat and spark, and Raul’s sad old heart hiccups in his chest.

“Planning my vacation?” he asks, nodding to the worn maps flaking in her hands.

Marilyn shakes her head. She has her fingers spread over the pages—Tucson under her pinkie, Mexico City beneath her thumb. “Just wondering where you’ve been.”

“Right here, chica,” he tells her. “Waiting for you.”

She laughs, puts the maps away. “For two hundred years?”

“ _Si_. Feels about right.” He opens his arms, lifts what remains of a brow. “I missed you.”

Easy as that, Marilyn comes home. She curls up in his arms, presses her lips to his. And Raul holds her—holds her like he’s afraid she’ll run, and maybe he is—caught up in the taste of her, wild like wind and rain and promise. He traces the swell of her jaw with his lips, dances his fingers down the curve of her spine and feels Marilyn’s smile against the ragged waste of his neck.

“You have chaps in that crate,” she whispers and when he pulls back to look in her eyes, he knows she doesn’t see a broken down old man. Somehow, she sees him as he used to be, as wild then as she is now, vicious and young and strong.

He loves her. Like a fist around his lungs, Raul loves her. 

He tells her so, in Spanish. All their arguments, he’s still not convinced she speaks it.

Smiling, he asks her, “You looking for an old world lover, then? A _vaquero_?”

Marilyn flushes red, eyes so hungry, her fingers on his zippers and snaps.

She breathes, “Yes.”


	14. Fireside

[chocochipbiscuit](http://chocochipbiscuit.tumblr.com) prompted: I’ve got skeletons

Masterpost [here](http://cyprith.tumblr.com/post/81803773331/five-word-fallout-prompts-masterpost). Leave prompts for me [here](http://cyprith.tumblr.com/ask).

—

**Fireside**

—

Whenever he watches Marilyn, Domino finds she is always dancing. Tonight, tribal music throbs in the city square, awash with color and light and the scent of many cooking meats. Marilyn spins in the thick of it, curls ablaze in street lights and firelights. He catches glimpses of her checkered jacket darting between twisting bodies, like trying to see the phoenix through the flames.

He is much too old for that sort of dancing, however vicious and bitter he feels beneath the burn of old slights. So Domino prowls the edges of the revelry, where the liquor flows thickest, dealing snubs and compliments like cards until his name precedes him, a whisper in the mouth of a crowd.

Here and there, he spots others of Marilyn’s… assembly. Her collection of foundlings. Her _friends_ , if one might be so crude.

Mr. Boone stands to one side, amongst a group of individuals in similar berets, a sweating beer in his hand and sunglasses obscuring his eyes. The furtive doctor prowls the farthest fringes, his ex-Legion mongrel laughing at his side. Closer to the fires, the ranch hand stands statue-still amongst a sea of writhing dancers, watching Marilyn as a moth watches the moon.

Pathetic, Domino thinks, but at least the man has taste.

In any case, he finds one of their number seated at the Atomic Wrangler’s impromptu bar, her back to the shanty-town stills and unopened crates. Domino recognizes her, though vaguely. They met once inside the Lucky 38, he thinks, and again on Marilyn’s assassination day. Both times the woman slid from his mind, leaving only the impression of tattered jeans and a sharp-edged smile.

Tonight, however, she sits with her shoulders held like knives, her whisky straight and neat. Firelight lingers on her face, licking at crow’s feet and old burns, and in her eyes he sees a wandering sort of hunger, a bone-deep discontent he’s long known the shape of.  

“Cassidy,” he greets, recalling her name through the film of past disinterest.

Hunched over her glass, she arches an eyebrow at him. “Looking for trouble?”

Smooth as hunting, Domino smiles, takes the seat beside her. “Aren’t I always?”

“I dunno. Heard you spent the last couple of centuries lounging around an old world hotel. Doesn’t sound like trouble to me.”

“Then you’ve obviously never enjoyed the tender comforts of the Madre.” Domino watches her, gauging her face, her bearing. “Marilyn doesn’t speak of it, I suppose?”

She snorts. “When have you known Marilyn to talk about much of anything? I love her, but the woman plays her cards close.”

“And you strike me as the sort of woman who keeps spare aces beneath the table,” he says.

Cassidy laughs, the darkness sharp and clean in her eyes.

“What are you looking for?” she asks him. “Whatever it is, you won’t find it here.”

“What?” He smiles. “Don’t trust me?”

“You’re nothing I haven’t seen before.” Cassidy shrugs and stands, careless like a challenge but for the wary calculation in her gaze. “They didn’t stop making guys like you after the war.”

And disappears into the crowd.

Interesting girl, he thinks. Plays with fire, but doesn’t like the heat.

Ah well, another day, perhaps.

Smiling, Domino orders a drink.

—

The second time he and Cassidy meet, Marilyn is still dancing. This time, the kinder lights of the Aces Theater do favors for her scars, paints her face in sweet half-shadow and the teeth she wears as pearls. Here, she sways with an edge, a quiet danger in her arms looped around Swank’s neck.

Domino watches them as he sings, following their progression behind the dark of his glasses. When the Chairman breaks away at last, he looks relieved.

Smart man.

At the end of the night, when his set melts into the next, Domino leaves the stage in favor of the bar and finds Cassidy waiting there.

“Didn’t take you for a fan,” he says, sitting down beside her. And then, to the barman, “Whatever she’s having.”

Cassidy shakes her head like a warning. “I take it strong, old man.”  

And once, she could have rankled him with that. But Domino watches Marilyn on the dance floor, winding her way from one body to the next, men and women in equal measure. If she has taught him anything, it’s that his age is just another weapon.

So Domino laughs, eyeing her glass. He says, “You must have practice.”

The blow falls precisely as he intends it. Cassidy’s hand goes white around her whiskey. Her chin dips a slow tango, steeled hard.

“I’ve got skeletons,” she says.

Domino smiles. “Darling, don’t we all?”

—

Unlike the last occasion, this time, she does not disappear. They sit together for some hours at the bar. The Rose of Sharon Cassidy wields her words like broken bottles in a bar fight, and oddly enough, Domino finds himself charmed. He spars with her, spinning empty arguments into the space between them until they are both half-drunk and laughing, debating the future of Marilyn’s enemies against a New Vegas stage.

On a whim, on the whisper of his own ghost, Domino invites her upstairs.

And Cassidy smiles, all mischief and sharp teeth.

“I’m leaving in the morning,” she says. “Caravan heads out at five.”

“Perfect,” he tells her. “Just enough time.”


End file.
